Guatemala – Journey into Evil

DAVID MONNERY

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 22 Books/Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1996

Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing plc 1996

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photograph © Collaboration JS / Arcangel Images

David Monnery asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008155452

Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 9780008155469

Version: 2015-11-04

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Epilogue

OTHER TITLES IN THE SAS OPERATION SERIES

About the Publisher

1

Tomás Xicay reached out a hand to shake his sister by the shoulder, then hesitated for several seconds, reluctant to disturb the rare serenity of her face. In the thin wash of moonlight seeping down through the forest canopy she looked almost a child once more, and seeing her like that he felt threatened by an avalanche of memories. Emelia was now a woman of twenty-two, but she had been only eight, and he fourteen, when both had been orphaned by their mother’s murder, and Tomás doubted whether he would ever shake the sense of paternal love and obligation which he still felt for his sister.

He smiled to himself and shook Emelia’s shoulder. Her eyes opened at once, and her head lifted off the Spanish grammar she had been using as a pillow. The condition of the book’s cover, streaked with layers of dirt and warped by damp, suggested that this was far from the first time that it had been pressed into such service.

‘It’s time,’ he whispered.

‘Right.’ She pulled herself into a sitting position, conscious of the activity in the shadows around her. She felt hungry, but that was nothing unusual.

As if in response to the feeling, Tomás handed her a peanut-butter cracker. ‘There’s only two more left,’ he said.

‘I can’t wait for breakfast,’ she replied wryly, easing herself on to her haunches and nibbling at the cracker.

He grinned, ruffled her hair, and moved on to check out the rest of the unit. ‘Ready?’ he asked each compañero and compañera. Some grunted assent, some offered a nervous ‘yes’, some gave him only a grim smile.

Two minutes later the column of thirteen was on the move, threading its way down through the trees. Each ‘compa’ concentrated on keeping the correct distance behind whomever he or she was following, short enough not to lose contact in the dark, long enough to maximize the number of survivors if the unit walked into an ambush. All around them the forest lay in virtual silence – there was no breeze to stir the branches, and most of the wildlife was holding its breath while the humans went by. Only the bats seemed indifferent to the guerrillas’ passage, and every now and then Emelia could hear the dry rustle of wings or see a dark shape glide across a small patch of moonlit sky. She loved times like this, when the natural world seemed to reach out and embrace her with its wonders.

Fifty metres further down the trail, Tomás was thinking about what awaited them in the small town of Tubiala, some six kilometres and ninety minutes away. He had every confidence in the Old Man’s abilities as a tactician and a strategist, but his own experience over the past five years had prepared him to expect the unexpected, which could be anything from a sprained ankle to the loss of half a unit.

The threat of sudden death was hardly inviting, but what Tomás dreaded far more was that his sister should be taken alive, and should suffer before death in the terrible way that their mother had suffered. Sometimes this fear would wake him with a dreadful start in the forest, and he would only just stop himself crying out. At such moments he would want to take Emelia back across the mountains and into Mexico, away from this land which had already brought their family such pain. But the sunrise always brought hope to set against the fear, and in any case he knew she would never agree to leave. This land was their home, to live or die for.

The unit marched on, down the long, forested slope to where the trail joined one of the many icy streams that tumbled down from the Cuchumatanes mountains. Stretches of their path were now open to the sky, but the moon had already set behind the peaks across the valley, and the darkness was deepening by the minute. For the next few hours they would be as invisible as any group of fighters could hope to be.

It was shortly after eleven when Tomás rounded a bend in the trail and saw Tubiala spread out in the valley below. There were only a handful of dim lights still burning in the small town, but the yellow glow from the illuminated military camp on the nearby rise seemed to suffuse the whole valley. He allowed the column to close up, so that each man and woman would have the chance to bring together the maps in their minds with the reality below.

After a final exchange of encouraging smiles and embraces the column moved off downhill again. The first small group to split off from the main body comprised Geraldo and Alicia, who had been entrusted with the unit’s only heavy weapon, an old but still efficient Israeli mortar which had been captured from the Army a couple of years earlier. Their task was to target the military camp, but to open fire only in the event of a general alarm being raised.

The next to leave were Carlos and Fernando, whose job was to cover the road winding west down the valley towards Champul. They were followed by Elena and Rosa, who had drawn guard duty on the road east, which joined Tubiala to the garrison town of San Juan Cotzal. That left seven compas for the Hotel Tezulutlán, two to cover each entrance and three to go in for Muñoz. Tomás had chosen José and Jorge to accompany him on the latter mission.

The seven waited just above the town for ten minutes, giving the road-watchers time to reach their positions, and then slipped between the first houses and on to the steep dirt track which led down towards the church. A dog barked away to their right, and another replied to the left, but there was no sign of life in the houses, and no movement on the streets.

They edged along the side of the small, whitewashed church, and Tomás gingerly edged an eye round its corner to check out the small square which lay at the heart of the town. It was empty, but beyond it, a few metres down the San Juan Cotzal road, he could see two figures sitting on either side of a kerosene lamp outside the front door of the hotel. They seemed to be playing a game of some sort.

So far, so good, Tomás told himself. If there were soldiers outside the hotel, then Muñoz was most probably inside. Tomás wondered whether it was arrogance or simple stupidity which had brought the major to the conclusion that he could leave the safety of the military camp with impunity. According to their informant, the man received almost daily deliveries of luxury items from his family in the capital, and had turned the upper floor of the town’s only hotel into a sort of court-in-exile. He hardly ever set foot in the military camp, preferring to summon his subordinates to the hotel for their instructions. And only the sadistic thrill of a punitive action was capable of luring him out into either the town or the countryside which surrounded it.

Hopefully, Tomás thought, Muñoz will shortly be receiving an overdue lesson in humility. A last lesson.

He turned back to the others, gave them the hand signal for ‘things as expected’, and led them silently around the perimeter of the dark square. On the far side he chose Emelia and Cristobal, the unit’s two best marksmen, for the task of watching the two sentries, and then led the other four through a space full of empty market stalls and down a narrow alley to the back of the Tezulutlán. There he paused, straining his ears for any unexpected sounds.

There was only silence. Tomás led the way in through the back door, and Jorge followed, with José bringing up the rear. The three men crept through the darkened kitchen, past two young boys asleep on the mats beneath the stove, and into the corridor which housed the reception desk. Light from the sentries’ kerosene lamp glowed in the window beside the hotel’s front door, revealing two more under-age employees curled up on the floor. As Tomás turned up the stairs he heard the two guards outside suddenly convulse with laughter at some private joke.

The carpet on the stairs was worn almost to extinction, but enough of it remained to muffle the sound of their footfalls. Tomás carefully lifted his eyes to the level of the upper floor, and found an empty corridor lit by a kerosene lamp. All he could hear was the sound of his own heart beating like a drum.

He signalled to the other two to wait, and stealthily advanced down the corridor to where the lamp was hanging from a piece of bent wire. He reached up, lifted the glass, and blew out the flame.

In the darkness he could see a faint light shining out from under one of the doors – the one which they had been told Muñoz used for a bedroom. And suddenly he could hear the sounds of sobbing coming from inside the room.

He tiptoed towards the door, gesturing to the others to follow. With his ear up against the wood he could hear a low male groaning intermingled with the sobbing. As Jorge unsheathed his machete, Tomás took his army revolver in one hand and started turning the doorknob with the other. He slowly eased the door open half an inch, and applied an eye to the room beyond.

The first thing he noticed was two wide and frightened eyes staring straight up at him. The girl was lying on the floor, half-wrapped in a blanket, but apparently naked. She made no sound, but quickly turned her head to the bed behind her, where another girl, barely into puberty, was rocking to and fro astride a naked man. She was sobbing steadily, the tears running down her half-developed breasts and on to his glistening chest, while he groaned with pleasure, eyes closed and hands tightly gripping her haunches.

As Tomás slowly pushed the door back the second girl also caught sight of him, and the motion of her body faltered, but only for a second. Two more thrusts of her small body kept Muñoz in blissful ignorance, until Tomás was over the bed and lifting her off, and then the major’s eyes opened, only to find three men standing over him and Jorge’s machete poised beside his erect penis.

The latter wilted, but before Muñoz could offer so much as a whimper José had stuffed a pair of convenient underpants into his mouth. Meanwhile Tomás was trying to talk to the two girls. The one who had been lying on the floor was trying to both dress and comfort the other girl, who was still sobbing with a quiet intensity which almost broke his heart. The elder girl explained that both of them came from a village down the valley which the Army had visited the previous week.

Tomás asked her if they wanted to go home or come into the mountains with the compas. They wanted to go home. They knew the Army would visit their village again, but they couldn’t just leave their families without giving them warning. If the villagers were expecting trouble then all but the eldest could be sent into the mountains, at least for a time. Tomás didn’t argue with her, but he did insist that Jorge escort them out of the hotel and through the town’s backstreets to the Champul road.

Having forced a shirt over Muñoz’s head, pulled a pair of trousers up his legs, and tied his hands behind his back, José was now looking around the room, an angry expression on his face. A portable television sat on a small table next to a pile of glossy American sex magazines. There were empty wine bottles everywhere, and there seemed to be enough items of food scattered across the floor to feed most mountain villages for a week.

‘Ready?’ Tomás asked, picking up the major’s belt with its holstered handgun and fastening it around his own waist.

José nodded, and grabbed Muñoz by one of his pinioned arms. ‘Any sound and your life is over,’ he whispered in Spanish, and two eyes stared blankly back at him. The man was in shock, Tomás realized – he couldn’t believe that this was happening to him. In a matter of minutes Muñoz’s future had turned from bright to non-existent.

They walked down the stairs, the major none too steadily. The soldiers outside were still playing their game, oblivious to events within, but the sleeping staff had been awakened, by either the noise or some instinct of solidarity. They watched wide-eyed as the prisoner was led through the lobby and kitchen and out by the back door.

A few minutes more, and all the compas were withdrawing from their positions around the sleeping town, slipping back up the hillside towards the spot where Geraldo and Alicia waited beside the mortar. Once gathered, the unit began its return journey, moving uphill as fast as the terrain allowed, the higher reaches of the Cuchumatanes looming above them like a huge rampart beneath a swiftly clearing sky. In the middle of the column, like an animal incapable of understanding the terrible depth of its unhappiness, Major Alfonso Lujan Muñoz stumbled along, a continuous soft mewling emanating from his gagged mouth.

Five days later, Colonel Luis Serrano, Operations Director of G-2 Military Intelligence, was standing at the window of his study, staring out at the garden. It was a beautiful dry-season afternoon, with hardly a trace of smog to besmirch the clear blue sky, and for once the brilliant colours of the various flowering plants seemed to justify all his wife’s battles with a never-ending series of new gardeners. She was away at the moment, visiting her sister at the Lake Atitlán villa, but their only daughter was with him, supposedly studying for upcoming examinations. From where Serrano stood, he could see her hard at work on an even tan, lying face down on a towel beside the pool, the top of her bikini untied.

Behind him, in the shadowed study, the tape continued to roll.

‘Do you remember the man Miguel Ustantil, who you ordered arrested in July last year?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why was he arrested?’

‘He was a troublemaker.’

‘Can you be more specific?’

The interrogator’s voice was so calm, Serrano thought, almost Buddha-like. There was no anger, or at least none on the surface. It was as if he had accepted everything on the general level, and was only now concerned with getting the details right. But was he really ‘El Espíritu’, ‘The Ghost’?

‘Did you personally supervise the flaying of his facial skin?’

‘Yes.’

Why had the idiot admitted it all? Serrano asked himself. He had been over Muñoz’s service record, and found nothing to indicate such a level of stupidity. He wondered what the bastards had done to turn the man to jelly and make him sound like an I-speak-your-weight machine. Whatever it was, it had left no marks on the body, and the subversivos’ choice of dumping ground – on the steps of the Swedish Embassy – had not given Serrano’s men the chance to add any.

In PR terms the whole thing had been a disaster. Copies of the tape had been delivered simultaneously to a dozen or so embassies and all the prominent human rights groups, leaving G-2 with very few options in the matter of damage limitation. Serrano’s superiors had not been amused.

He found himself wondering once more if it really could be El Espíritu. The man was supposed to have died over ten years ago, though admittedly his body had never been properly identified. Even so…The most reliable witnesses had estimated his age at over sixty in 1980, and the average life expectancy of the most docile Indians was not much more than fifty. It was hard to believe…

But the tape certainly bore the man’s mark. It wasn’t just a catalogue of Muñoz’s overzealous interrogations and punishments – in several of the incidents under discussion the man asking the questions was very careful to draw out why the Army had become involved, and exactly which interests – or, to be more precise, the interests of which landowners – they were seeking to promote.

But then again…

Serrano smiled to himself. The foreign press were not interested in why – they were too busy wallowing in hacked-off hands and breasts and gouged-out eyes. None of them got the point, which was that keeping a primitive people under control necessitated the use of primitive methods.

It was possible, of course, to go too far…

‘Why did you take the six men back to San Benito?’

‘To show the villagers of the region what lay in store for them if they made trouble.’

‘You had them stripped naked, and each man was held erect while you pointed out the various wounds on their bodies – the wire burns and cigarette burns, the severed ears, the split tongues, the hands with no nails and the feet with no soles …’

‘Yes.’

‘And then?’

‘They were executed.’

‘How?’

‘They were burnt.’

‘You had your men pour gasoline over them and set fire to them?’

‘Yes.’

That was Muñoz’s last word on the tape, and for all Serrano knew his last on this earth. Guerrilla voices read brief extracts from the Geneva Convention and some UN-sponsored accord on human rights – the pompous bastards! – before the voice of the questioner pronounced sentence. There was an eerie gap of several seconds, and then the sound of a single gunshot. Serrano had heard the tape through twice before, and was expecting it, but the report still made him jump.

In the garden outside, his daughter had turned over, and was treating her bare breasts to the afternoon sunshine. Behind her the Indian gardener was absent-mindedly scratching his behind as he directed the hose at the scarlet bougainvillea.

Serrano decided he needed to know more about the history of ‘The Ghost’.

The following day, shortly one o’clock, Chris Martinson was sitting in Antigua’s Restaurant Dona Luisa, waiting for his lunch to arrive. The place was as crowded as usual, with a clientele about equally divided between locals and gringo tourists, but Chris had managed to get the seat he wanted, on the terrace overlooking the interior courtyard. On the previous day a bird he had not recognized had paid an all-too-brief visit to the ornamental palm below, and he was hoping for a repeat performance.

He turned to one of the two newspapers he had just bought in the square, the one printed in Spanish, and started reading the lead story.

According to the Guatemalan Daily Planet an elaborate hoax had recently been played on those members of the international press corps who liked to defame the nation’s security forces. Subversivos responsible for the murder of Army Major Alfonso Lujan Muñoz had fabricated a tape purporting to contain an interrogation of the young major, and a counterfeit admission of guilt in regard to certain crimes, all of which were known to have been committed by the subversivos themselves. Unfortunately for the perpetrators of this vicious hoax, voice identification experts had been able to establish that the speaker on the tape was not in fact Major Muñoz.

‘And there goes another flying pig,’ Chris murmured to himself. He reached for the Daily News, the English-language newspaper for tourists and Guatemala’s resident British and American community, and looked for another account of the affair. He expected to find at least a different slant – the Daily News, for reasons which no one seemed able to fathom, was allowed a unique latitude when it came to criticizing the authorities.

Sure enough, the writer managed to pour scorn on the official version of the story without directly contradicting it. ‘We can only wonder,’ he wrote, ‘that after forty years of incessant defeat the subversivos should still have the leisure time, the technology, and the system of communications necessary, to mount such an elaborate hoax.’

Chris smiled to himself, and cleared a space for the arriving chicken sandwich and papaya licuardo. The trouble with Guatemala was that most of the time it was hard to believe the evidence of your own ears and eyes. The accounts of atrocities committed by both sides were probably exaggerated, but he had no reason to believe that they were imaginary. And yet the country was so eye-achingly beautiful, and not just in the matter of landscape. Costa Rica, which Chris had visited several years earlier, had beautiful countryside, but compared with Guatemala it seemed somehow bland, two-dimensional.

It was the people who made Guatemala magical, the Mayan Indians, though how they did it was hard to say. They certainly looked picturesque in their colourful traditional costumes, and their religious ceremonies seemed like a fascinating glimpse into an earlier world, but it was more than that. Something to do with the depth of their commitment to the reality of community, perhaps. An American whom Chris met had argued that Westerners here somehow just locked on to the missing piece of their own social jigsaw – a sense of belonging. Here among the Mayans, he claimed, it had somehow miraculously survived.

Chris wasn’t sure he agreed, but he had yet to hear a better explanation. Every gringo he had talked to since his arrival had felt the same sense of magic. The only people who didn’t, or so it seemed, were the Ladinos, the Spanish-speaking non-Indians who made up thirty per cent of the population and one hundred per cent of the ruling elite.

Certainly the family Chris was staying with as part of his language course had little good to say about the Indians or their culture. Their ambitions were all directed towards total submersion in the wonders of the West. Exciting memories of visiting the McDonald’s in Guatemala City vied with distress at there not being one in Antigua.

Chris finished the milk shake and paid his bill, walked downstairs and emerged from the dark corridor into the brilliance of the sunlit street. Antigua was a beautiful town, with its grids of cobbled streets, its mostly one-storey buildings painted in a pleasing variety of pastel shades, and its myriad colonial churches and monasteries. And all of it nestling beneath the three volcanoes: the towering Agua to the south, and Acatenango and the ever-smoking Fuego, ‘Fire’, to the south-west.

Chris looked at his watch and found he still had fifteen minutes before his afternoon class was due to begin. The bookshop he had noticed the previous day was just across the street, and finding a convenient gap in the one-way traffic he walked over. He was examining the window display when a reflected movement caught his eye. A man had started to cross the street behind him but then apparently changed his mind. He was now standing on the opposite pavement, staring at Chris’s back. Then, as if suddenly aware that Chris was watching his reflection he abruptly turned away, and stood gazing down the street.

Chris went into the shop and, after a minute or so of browsing among the natural history books, sneaked a look out of the window. The man was nowhere to be seen.

He decided he was being paranoid.

Five minutes later, walking across the main square, he stopped to tie his shoelaces and noticed the same man, some thirty metres behind him, staring vacantly into space.

Lieutenant Arturo Vincenzo ran a hand through his luxuriant black hair and scratched the back of his neck. ‘So how did they manage it?’ he asked his cousin. ‘How did they get the body all the way from the Cuchumatanes to the front door of the Swedish Embassy without anyone seeing anything?’

Captain Jorge Alvaro shrugged and took a slug from the bottle of Gallo beer. ‘El Espíritu works in mysterious ways,’ he said sardonically.

The two men were in a bar on Zona 1’s Calle 14, just around the corner from the Policia Nacional building, where Vincenzo’s Department of Criminal Investigation had its headquarters. Alvaro worked for G-2, and the cousins’ meetings were as often dictated by mutual business as they were by familial ties. This time, though, Vincenzo was simply indulging his curiosity – the DCI had not been invited to share in the Army’s latest public relations disaster.

The early evening hour ensured that the bar was almost empty, but Vincenzo kept his voice down in any case. ‘He is not in our files under that name,’ he said. ‘But…’

‘He is not known under any other name,’ Arturo growled. ‘Do you want another beer?’

‘Sure.’

Alvaro lifted a bottle and raised two fingers at the boy behind the bar.

‘When was he last heard of?’

‘Nineteen eighty-three. Maybe. We first heard of the bastard around 1979, but by 1983 it was looking less and less likely that only one man was involved. If there was, then he must have had a fucking time machine – his name was coming up in the Atitlán area, the Cuchumatanes, even way out in the Petén, and pretty much at the same time.’ He picked up the fresh bottle and poured it into the empty glass, shaking his head as he did so. ‘There’s no way it could have been the same man.’

‘If there’s one thing those Indians can do, it’s walk.’

Alvaro grunted. ‘They can’t fly, though, can they?’

Vincenzo grinned. ‘Thank Christ for that.’ He took another slug of beer. ‘Weren’t there any eyewitness descriptions of him or them?’

‘Hundreds of them – that was the problem. Most of them were unwilling witnesses, and no doubt most of them lied with their last breath. So El Espíritu was tall, short, dark, fair, blue-eyed, black-eyed – you name it. Absolutely fucking useless. The only semi-reliable description we had came from two English soldiers.’

‘What? How did that happen?’

‘Remember in 1980, when that guerrilla group took over the Tikal ruins for several days?’

‘Vaguely.’

‘They took about twenty tourists hostage, most of them English. The whole business lasted four days, I think. The guerrilla leader…’

‘El Espíritu.’

‘So he claimed. He would only negotiate through foreign intermediaries, and, like I said, most of the tourists were English, so they sent in a couple of their soldiers from Belize, men from that group which had handled the Iranian Embassy siege in London a few months earlier…’

‘The SAS.’

‘Yeah, that was them. Anyway…’

‘There’s one of them here now,’ Vincenzo interjected. ‘In Antigua.’

Alvaro was surprised. ‘Doing what?’

‘That’s what we wanted to know. He picked up a tail at the airport – the usual routine – and on his first night here he had dinner with the British Military Attaché, which isn’t routine for tourists. So we kept the tail on him and had the London Embassy check him out. He’s still on active service with the British Army, the SAS Regiment, but not for much longer. And he is currently on leave, improving his Spanish at one of the schools in Antigua.’

‘Your people have checked that out?’

Vincenzo looked hurt. ‘Of course. He’s doing just what he’s supposed to be doing.’

‘How old is he?’ Alvaro asked.

‘Thirty-two.’

‘Then he couldn’t have been one of the men at Tikal.’

Vincenzo smiled. ‘Now that would have been a coincidence.’

Alvaro shrugged and gulped down the rest of his beer. ‘I have to get back,’ he said as he got to his feet.

‘I thought you were finished for the day.’

‘I just remembered something.’

Alvaro walked briskly across the street to where the big Mercedes with smoked-glass windows was parked, and drove it slowly back to G-2 headquarters, his brain mulling over the idea which his cousin had unwittingly presented to him. The two English officers, whoever they were, had not only seen El Espíritu, but presumably had also heard him speak. And perhaps, in the spirit of co-operation between armed forces, one or both of the Englishmen could be persuaded to identify the voice on the tape.

Less than a mile to the north, Tomás Xicay was one of five Indians sitting in the back of an open truck, but the only one among them who was keeping an impatient watch out for their driver. Logic told him he was in no danger of apprehension – there was no Army major’s body hidden in this truck – but he couldn’t help feeling vulnerable. Beyond the cathedral, which loomed into the sky above the market, lay the city’s main square and across that stood the Palacio Nacional, which housed, among other things, the offices of the dreaded G-2.

Guatemala City was not easy on the nerves, and Tomás found himself wondering for the tenth time in as many minutes why he had chosen to stay the extra couple of days once their mission had been accomplished. To see his uncle was the obvious answer, but his uncle had hardly been at home, and his aunt had been turned into a nervous wreck by his mere presence in the house. There would be no next time, Tomás decided. Or at least not until the war was won.

It was getting dark now, and even a couple of his fellow travellers were beginning to stir with impatience, muttering to each other in Cakchiquel. This wasn’t a language Tomás was fluent in, but the gist of the conversation was clear enough – where the fuck was the driver?

Tomás rearranged his legs on the wooden floor. Judging from detritus scattered across it, the truck had arrived at the Central Market that morning loaded with squash, but now, like the many others waiting nearby, it was empty save for those taking passengers back into the Western Highlands.

On the nearest truck three Indian women were wearing the traditional skirts of San Pedro La Laguna and conversing in his native language, Tzutujil. Tomás had grown up in Santiago Atitlán, another large village on the shores of Lake Atitlán, and thought perhaps he recognized one of the women. But he made no attempt at contact – it had been almost ten years since he had lived in his home village, and he had no desire to draw attention to himself.

The driver arrived at last, wearing the smile of several beers on his face. But his driving skills seemed unimpaired, and soon the truck was threading its way out of the capital and on to the Pan-American Highway. As it climbed the first of many winding inclines the last slice of setting sun was briefly visible between distant volcanoes, and then night descended, reducing the world to those stretches of tarmac, verge and cliff face which fell within the glare of the truck’s headlights.

Staring out into the darkness Tomás found himself studying a mental picture of his father.

Miguel Mendoza Xicay had been tall for an Indian, five feet nine inches by the American count, and he had worn his hair long, the way he believed their Mayan ancestors had always done. He had not been an educated man – how could he with no school in the village of his childhood? – and it seemed likely that he had been too good-hearted to understand the realities of life in Guatemala. The family had access to a little land on the slopes of the volcano behind the village, and they had grown beans, coffee, corn and various fruits. The prices they received were always derisory, and no money could ever be saved, but the family only rarely went hungry, and there was usually the additional cash the children earned from making and selling handicrafts to help them through the worst times.

Then the Army had come, and established a camp only a couple of kilometres outside the town. The amount of land available to the townspeople shrank as Indian deeds went mysteriously missing and other claimants appeared with deeds which the local Spanish-speaking authorities fell over themselves to approve. The local people protested and the most vocal swiftly disappeared, never to be seen again, either dead or alive. Rumour had it that most of them had been thrown from helicopters, still conscious, into the smoking maw of San Pedro.

Through all these troubles Miguel Xicay had tenaciously clung to the hope that somehow the Army’s behaviour was an aberration, that if the authorities only knew what was really happening then they would step in and put a stop to it. No one expected life to be fair, and no one expected the rich Ladinos to behave like true Christians, but he found it hard to believe that such a campaign of brutality and murder could be sponsored by a government.

It was no accident that the man whom Tomás’s father most admired was the local priest, an American named Stanley Rother. The father had arrived in Santiago Atitlán in the mid-sixties, and like Miguel Xicay he had watched the escalating brutality with a mixture of horror and disbelief. When the Army called a meeting of all the village leaders he had listened with mounting rage as the local commander blamed all the killings, the rapes, the tortured corpses, on the communist subversivos, and furthermore demanded that the villagers report any suspicious behaviour to the Army.

He had got slowly to his feet, and in a silence pregnant with dread, told the Army commander that no one was fooled, that everyone knew it was the soldiers who raped and killed and tortured, and that they must stop these acts against man and God.

The next morning Stanley Rother had been shredded by automatic gunfire in the doorway of his church.

Tomás’s father had gone out that evening to talk with his friends, and had never been seen alive again. His body had been found on the volcano slopes a week later, minus tongue, eyes and hands. The twelve-year-old Tomás had not been meant to see it, but he had, and he was not sorry. He had needed to imprint it on his brain like a scar, because only then could he be sure never to forget.

And nor would he, he thought, as the truck laboured its way up another slope. Not that he needed that one dreadful memory any more. In the thirteen years which had passed since that day he had lost a mother, two brothers, many friends – and all of them still lived inside him.

His father especially so.

I knew him and still he is there in me…

Tomás’s hand moved involuntarily towards the pocket where he kept the dog-eared copy of Neruda’s poem. It was too dark to read, but that didn’t matter – he knew all the pages, all the lines, off by heart.

‘I, who knew him, saw him go down,’ the inner voice recited. ‘Till he existed only in what he was leaving – streets he could scarcely be aware of, houses he never would inhabit. I come back to see him and every day I wait …’

2

Luis Serrano leaned back in his leather swivel chair, fingers intertwined behind his head, and ran his tongue along his upper lip, tasting the trace of brandy which still clung to his moustache. Through two walls he could hear the TV football match his son and friends were watching, and the faint rat-a-tat of fireworks in the distant Plaza Mayor was audible above that. Presumably the Indians were dragging one of their Jesus statues around the square, choking themselves on incense as they went.

Serrano leaned forward once more, and absent-mindedly tapped the report with his right index finger. He now felt reasonably certain that the El Espíritu who had been such an irritant in the early eighties, and the subversivo on the tape from Quiche, were one and the same man.

It was not a good time for his reappearance. The Americans wanted a negotiated settlement with the subversivos, and the Government’s ability to impose one that was lacking in any specific commitments – one that avoided any discussion at all of the land issue – rested on the Army keeping a strong upper hand in the rural areas. The last thing anyone needed was the public resurrection of some old Indian hero, and more humiliations like the Muñoz business.

Serrano reached for his Zippo lighter – a gift from a former American military attaché – and the packet of Marlboro Lights. Alvaro’s idea of asking the English soldier to identify the voice was a good one, as far as it went. The previous day he had read through the records of the business in Tikal fifteen years before, and there was no doubt that both of the Englishmen had enjoyed several face-to-face conversations with the leader of the terrorists. If anyone could definitively identify the bastard, then they could.

He had ordered G-2’s man in the London embassy to run a check on the pair of them. The older one – James Docherty – had retired from the Army, and was apparently no longer living in England, but his younger companion was still on active service. It had taken some time, and not a little money – always assuming the agent’s expenses sheet could be believed – to ascertain that Darren Wilkinson was still serving in 22 SAS Regiment. His current rank was sergeant, he was attached to the Regiment’s Training Wing, and he was stationed at the Stirling Lines barracks near Hereford, some 120 miles west of London.

Serrano watched the smoke from his cigarette curl away, remembering the woman in London on his second and last visit. She had been one of the English secretaries at the embassy, with bright-red hair and pale skin. So exotic. So aggressive in bed.

He sighed and forced his mind back to the matter in hand. Mention of the Training Wing reminded him of something…ah yes, that business in Colombia which the SAS had been involved in a few years earlier. He had heard about it from the American Military Attaché at an embassy party. The Colombian Government, busy setting up an anti-narcotics unit, had asked the British Government to send them a couple of advisers. When one of the advisers and a local politician had been kidnapped by drug barons half an army of SAS soldiers had dropped out of the sky to rescue them. Or so the story went.

It didn’t really matter how true the last part was, Serrano thought. The point was that Britain had been prepared to send advisers to Colombia to help in the fight against drug trafficking. Might they not be equally willing to send one man to help in the fight against the subversivos?

This man Wilkinson could take part as an observer in the sweep which was planned for the following week. And when they captured or killed this El Espíritu then the Englishman would be on the spot to identify the miserable little shit.

And he would also, Serrano realized with satisfaction, be a neutral witness to the old boy’s death. No one would believe an Army report that El Espíritu had been killed, but an Englishman…His testimony could lay this particular ‘ghost’ once and for all, and prevent a host of other claimants to the name springing up in the dead man’s place.

Yes, Serrano thought. He liked it. He liked it a lot.

Would the British agree? They still had a reliable enough government from all reports, though maybe not quite so reliable as in the woman Thatcher’s time. In any event the SAS was unlikely to be a haven for communist sympathizers.

But Serrano had to admit that Guatemala’s reputation in the world had suffered in recent years. All those little creeps from Amnesty International and Americas Watch, living their safe little lives in the rich man’s world and bleating on about human rights abuses everywhere else.

How could he sugar the pill? What could Guatemala offer the British?

Another Belize treaty? The last president to sign one had almost been tried on treason charges, and the idea of sticking his neck out that far was not particularly appealing. It would be better, he decided, to go through the Americans. They had a keener appreciation of what was really at stake in Central America, and they could hardly refuse to help when their own beloved peace negotiations were on the line. ‘We are so close to a breakthrough,’ Serrano murmured out loud in rehearsal, ‘and this one terrorist could undermine everything we have all worked for.’

It sounded convincing enough for the US State Department. The Americans could then bribe or threaten the British, whichever they deemed more appropriate. Serrano picked up the phone to call the Foreign Ministry, trying in vain to remember the name of the current Foreign Minister.

The request for diplomatic assistance was delivered to the State Department by Guatemala’s Washington ambassador early the following afternoon. After receiving his visitor, Sam Udovich, Acting Head of the Central America desk, stared out at the falling snow and slowly consumed a strawberry cheese croissant before reaching for the internal phone.

‘Clemens,’ a voice answered.

‘Brent, hi. The Guatemalan Ambassador’s just been darkening my office door.’

‘And what do the death squads want today?’

Udovich told him.

Clemens listened in silence, and then laughed. ‘They want some Brit soldier to look over a line-up of corpses and pick out the guilty man?’ he asked incredulously.

‘That’s one way of putting it,’ Udovich agreed. ‘It is in our interests that they get this guy.’

‘That’s what Ollie North said.’

‘He was right,’ Udovich said drily.

Clemens sighed audibly.

‘Look,’ Udovich went on patiently, ‘I’d take it as a personal favour if you could get the Brits to get with the programme on this one.’ And if you can, went the first unspoken message, then I owe you one. And if you can’t or won’t, went the second, then don’t come to me for a favour anytime soon.

‘I’ll ask them,’ Clemens said.

‘Just so long as you don’t leave them in any doubt about how important we think this is.’

‘How important you think this is.’

Udovich snorted. ‘It’s not going to cost the Brits any money, for Christ’s sake. And that’s all they seem to care about these days.’

‘I’ll ask them,’ Clemens repeated. ‘If that’s all…’

‘One more thing. I think their intelligence boys should run a check on this guy Wilkinson, just in case. The Guatemalans want someone they can rely on – you understand me?’

‘Yeah,’ Clemens said. ‘I get the message.’

‘And they want him vetted?’ the Prime Minister asked rhetorically. He shook his head, looking saddened by the impertinence of the American request.

‘Just informally,’ Martin Clarke said assuagingly. He was the junior minister at the Foreign Office responsible for formulating a reply to Washington’s request.

The Prime Minister shook his head again, and then squeezed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, as if the shaking had given him a headache. He blinked and looked round the table. ‘Any comments?’ he asked.

For a moment no one seemed to have any.

‘What’s the current state of play in Guatemala?’ asked the young man with the flashy tie who was representing MI5.

‘Business as usual,’ Clarke answered drily.

‘Not quite,’ the silver-haired man from MI6 disagreed. ‘The Government claims to have won the war against the guerrillas, but the fact that they’re willing to negotiate a settlement suggests a rather different story.’

‘The negotiations are just a sop to the Americans,’ Clarke insisted.

‘That’s not what our people think,’ said the MI6 man. ‘They reckon the number of guerrillas in the mountains is at least holding steady, and may even be growing.’

‘Does it matter?’ asked Bill Warren, the Junior Defence Minister. ‘We’re only being asked for one adviser for a couple of weeks. I’m more interested in what sort of favour we can expect in return.’

‘Such as?’ the Prime Minister asked. ‘I don’t think we’ll get any better guarantees on Belize. No, I think we’d be better off treating this as nothing more than a favour to Washington.’ He paused for a moment and looked up, as if seeking divine guidance. ‘But the further we can distance the Government from the whole business, the better I’ll like it,’ he added. ‘If this SAS soldier gets caught up in some ghastly atrocity then all the human rights people will be screaming blue murder at me. I think this should be a strictly military affair – a matter of shared courtesy between armed forces. With a high security rating. “Need to know” only.’

He turned to the two junior ministers. ‘Bill, you liaise with Five in making sure Sergeant Wilkinson has a clean bill of health. Martin, you get in touch with the SAS CO and tell him what’s required. And let the Americans know we’ll be happy to oblige them.’

The PM took the bridge of his nose in the familiar pincer grip and blinked twice. ‘Now let’s get on to something important.’

Lieutenant-Colonel Barney Davies, the Commanding Officer of 22 SAS, had just re-entered his office, having returned for the Daily Mirror he had left behind, when the phone rang. He stared at it in exasperation for several seconds, and then reluctantly picked it up. ‘Davies,’ he said, more mildly than he felt. He had an important evening ahead, and hoped to God this call was not going to foul it up.

‘Good evening, Lieutenant-Colonel,’ a familiar voice said. ‘My name’s Martin Clarke. Foreign Office. I don’t believe we’ve met.’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Davies said warily. He’d seen the bastard on TV enough times. In fact the Junior Minister had been on Question Time only the previous week, wearing a striped shirt so loud that it seemed to affect the broadcast signal.

‘We’ve had a request from the Americans,’ Clarke began, and went on to outline exactly who and what had been asked for.

Barney Davies listened patiently, liking the whole business less with each passing sentence. It wasn’t immediately apparent from Clarke’s spiel, however, whether Whitehall was asking or telling the SAS to co-operate. ‘So, you’d like me to ask Sergeant Wilkinson if he’s willing to go?’ Davies suggested optimistically.

Clarke picked up on the tone, and made good the omission. ‘Sergeant Wilkinson is a serving NCO in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces. It has been decided that he should serve his country accordingly in this particular matter. As his Commanding Officer, you are naturally being notified. If you wish, I can get you written orders from the Ministry of Defence…’

‘That will not be necessary. I will notify him, and see to the appropriate briefing…’

‘Good. I’ll see that everything we have is on your fax tomorrow morning. Wilkinson is booked on the 10 a.m. flight to Miami this Sunday,’ he added, ‘connecting with Guatemala City that afternoon.’

‘That’s…’ Davies started to say, but Clarke had hung up. The SAS CO stood for a moment holding the dead receiver, then slammed it down with what he considered appropriate violence. Then he sat seething in his chair for several moments, staring out through the office window.

Across the frosty parade ground the last of the sunlight was silhouetting the distant peaks of the Black Mountains.

‘Bastard politicians,’ he eventually murmured, and picked up the phone again.

Having ascertained from the Duty Officer that ‘Razor’ Wilkinson was on twenty-four hours’ leave, the CO left the room for the second time in fifteen minutes, wishing that he hadn’t answered Clarke’s call. The American request wouldn’t have gone away, but at least he and Razor would have had one more evening in blissful ignorance of its existence. Though come to think of it, the bastard would probably have called him at home.

Davies climbed into his BMW, turned on the ignition and pressed in the cassette. Billie Holiday’s voice filled the car with its smoky sadness.

He drove out through the sentry post and started working his way through the rush-hour traffic towards his cottage on Hereford’s western outskirts. ‘Look on the bright side,’ he told himself. A couple of years ago he would have felt much less happy about sending Wilkinson into a situation like this one. The man had always been a fine soldier, as sharp as he was brave, but until recently his leadership potential had been undermined by a stubborn refusal to grow up emotionally. Bosnia – and the wife he had found there – had seen him come of age, and Razor now seemed as complete a soldier as the SAS had to offer.

So why, Davies asked himself bitterly, put him at risk for a bunch of psychotic generals? What possible British interest could be served by identifying a guerrilla leader for people whose only claim to fame was that they had invented the death squad?

In fact, the more he thought about it the angrier Davies became. A mission like this should be offered to someone, not simply ordered. This guerrilla leader posed no more threat to the integrity of the United Kingdom than Eric Cantona, and probably considerably less. And though Davies didn’t know much about Guatemala, he was willing to bet that anyone faced with choosing between Army and guerrillas on moral grounds wouldn’t have an easy time of it.

He gripped the wheel a little tighter, and wondered, for only about the third time in a military career which spanned nearly thirty years, whether he should refuse a direct order. It would make no difference to Razor – he would simply receive the order from someone else – but the gesture might be worthwhile. After all, he only had another three months in the CO’s chair – what could they do to him?

Davies sighed. Who was he kidding? They could make his life hell, and just when he was happier than he had been for years. All the cushy jobs and consultancies which a retired lieutenant-colonel could expect to be offered would just melt away. All he would ever hear would be the sound of doors closing in his face.

He turned off the main road and thought about Jean. Did he have the right to risk whatever future they might have together by making grand gestures?

She would expect nothing less of him, he decided.

But there was also Razor’s future to consider. He had almost ten years to go before retirement from active service at forty-five, and a refusal to accept this mission – always assuming the bastards didn’t go for a court martial – would certainly stop the lad’s career in its tracks.

Davies felt his temper rising again. The man was a national hero, for God’s sake, whether the nation knew it or not. He had been one of eight SAS men landed on the Argentine mainland during the Falklands War, and one of six who had returned alive. Between them the two four-man patrols had provided early warning of enemy air attacks which could otherwise have wrecked the San Carlos landings, and destroyed three Exocet missiles which might well have claimed three British ships and God knows how many lives.

There had never been any public recognition of their contribution, and now it seemed to Davies as if insult was being added to injury.

He guided the car down the swampy lane to his cottage. Once inside, he poured himself a generous malt whisky, put on Miles’s Porgy and Bess with the volume turned down low, and looked up Razor’s home number in his book.

It was Mrs Wilkinson who answered. Davies had first met Hajrija on the occasion of her arrival in Britain two years earlier, when she was accompanying an SAS team returning from their investigation of alleged renegade activities by a regimental comrade. The welcoming committee from the MoD had asked her what she was doing on British soil, and her future husband had told him that she wanted to see if England was ‘really full of pricks like you’.

Davies smiled inwardly at the memory as he asked to speak to Razor.

‘He’s in Birmingham,’ Hajrija told him. ‘Seeing his mother and his football team. The two great loves of his life,’ she added with a laugh.

Razor had always been close to his mother, Davies remembered. ‘Can you give me her number?’ he asked.

‘Yes, but he won’t be there. He’s meeting friends before the match.’

Hajrija’s English was almost as good as Razor’s, Davies thought. Maybe even better. ‘I’ll call his mother and leave a message,’ he said.

She gave him the number. ‘What’s it about?’ she asked with her usual directness.

‘Sorry, I can’t tell you,’ Davies said.

‘That doesn’t sound good.’

Davies didn’t deny it. ‘When is he due back?’

‘He’s driving back in the morning. I think he has a class at twelve.’

‘Thanks.’ He hung up, feeling worse for hearing the anxiety in Hajrija’s voice. He took a sip of malt, and punched out the Birmingham number she had given him.

The drive from Villa Park to the house his mother and stepfather had recently bought in Edgbaston took Razor Wilkinson about forty-five minutes. It was the first time he had seen Tottenham since November, and the first game they had lost since…November. Someone up there had obviously decided he was too damn happy these days. Bastard.

Razor pulled the car in behind his mum’s Escort and noticed with pleasure that the downstairs lights were still on. He let himself in, and found her watching the opening credits of Newsnight.

‘Jack’s gone to bed,’ she said. ‘He’s got an early start tomorrow.’

And he’s probably also being tactful, Razor thought. One of the things he liked most about his new stepfather was that the man understood how close the bond was between mother and son. Since Razor’s babyhood it had just been the two of them – the classic one-parent family of Tory demonology. And Razor had known a lot of kids with two parents who would have happily swapped them for the relationship he had with one.

He sat down and grinned at her.

‘They lost,’ she said.

‘Yeah, but they looked good.’

She smiled at him. ‘I remember you sulking for days when they lost.’

‘I was only about six.’

‘Twenty-six, more like. Hajrija phoned,’ she added. ‘Your boss wants to talk to you. Urgently.’

‘The CO?’

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Davies. He wanted you to call him as soon as you got in. The number’s by the phone in the hall.’

Razor left her with Peter Snow and walked out into the hall, wondering what could be so urgent that it couldn’t wait until the morning. If Hajrija had passed on the message, then she had to be all right.

He keyed the number, listened to eight rings, and was about to give up when a somewhat breathless Davies answered.

‘Wilkinson, boss,’ Razor replied. He could hear a woman’s voice in the background, which both surprised and vaguely pleased him. He had always felt an instinctive liking for Barney Davies, and it was fairly common knowledge around the Regimental mess that the man’s marriage break-up had turned him into a social recluse. Maybe he was coming out of his shell at last.

Or, then again, it might be a hooker. Or his mother.

‘Something’s come up,’ the CO was saying. ‘Remember the week you and Docherty spent in Guatemala in 1980?’

‘Christ, not very well. I’d only been badged a few months. Why, what’s happened?’

Davies told Razor exactly what Clarke had told him, and did his best to keep his doubts to himself. Before airing them, he wanted Razor’s reaction. ‘Would you be able to recognize this man?’ he asked, hoping the answer would be no.

‘Yeah, I don’t see why not. We spent quite a lot of time with him. Even taught him how to play Cheat.’

‘Did you like him?’

‘I wouldn’t say that. He was holding English hostages, and threatening to kill them.’ He paused. ‘Docherty sort of liked him, though,’ he said.

Davies grunted. ‘Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.’

‘What about Chris Martinson?’ Razor asked.

‘What about him?’ Davies asked, surprised.

‘He’s in Guatemala.’

‘He is? I had no idea. What the hell’s he doing there?’

‘There’s a town there where you can do Spanish courses and live with a family while you’re doing them. He’s hoping for a field job with one of the charities when his term ends, and he wanted to bring his Spanish up to scratch.’ Razor grunted. ‘And no doubt he’s doing some bird-watching while he’s there.’

‘How long has he been gone?’

‘Two weeks, two and a half…I’m not sure. I think he’s due back at the end of next week. He had a lot of leave piled up.’

‘Ah,’ Davies said, wondering how he could make use of the coincidence. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘sleep on this, and I’ll see you in my office when you get here in the morning.’

‘OK, boss,’ Razor said, wondering why the CO sounded so anxious. Maybe he’d forgotten to drop in at Boots on the way home to pick up some condoms. Or maybe he knew more about the situation in Guatemala than Razor did. Which wouldn’t be difficult. He couldn’t remember reading or seeing a single news item about the place in the past fifteen years.

He did remember the ruins where the negotiations had taken place. The two of them had driven there by jeep along the jungle road from Belize, stayed in a one-room inn which deserved a minus-five-star rating, and met with the terrorist leader on a square of grass surrounded by soaring stone temples. Tikal had been the name of the place. There had been monkeys in the trees, and huge red parrots zooming round in formation like dive-bombers, and those birds with the huge multicoloured beaks whose name he couldn’t remember. Around dawn the mist had lingered in the trees, and one morning he and Docherty had climbed to the top of one of the temples and seen the tops of the others sticking out through the roof of mist like strange islands in a strange ocean.

He was only twenty-one then, not much more than a kid, and he supposed he hadn’t really appreciated it.

‘You OK?’ his mother asked from the living-room doorway.

‘Yeah, fine. It’s just one more job that no one else can do.’

The moon had been gone for several minutes, and the luminous haze above the distant ridge-top was visibly fading. Tomás Xicay could almost feel the sighs of relief as true darkness enveloped the clearing where the compas were taking a ten-minute rest-stop. There was nothing but shadows around him, and the rustle of movement, and the whisper of conversation.

A hand came down on his shoulder. ‘Is everything OK, Tomás?’

‘Sí, Commandante,’ he told the Old Man. He was tireder than tired, but then which of them wasn’t? Except maybe the Old Man himself, who always seemed utterly indefatigable.

‘Only a few weeks,’ the Old Man said wryly, and moved on to encourage someone else.

Tomás smiled to himself in the dark. When, two months earlier, their current strategy had been agreed, that had been the crucial phrase. ‘We must get them on the run, if only for a few weeks,’ the Old Man had told the group leaders gathered that night on the hill outside Chichicastenango. ‘Show the Army and the Americans that we are still alive, and that they are not immune to retribution.’

What would happen after those ‘few weeks’ no one knew for certain, but there was no doubt that the sort of aggressive tactics they had decided on would have a limited lifespan, because surprise always carried a diminishing return, and without it they would always be outgunned. And they knew that the longer they pursued these tactics the more certain it was that most of them would be killed.

As the column got back underway Tomás found himself wondering whether the Old Man ever had any doubts, and if so who it was he shared them with. Tomás at least had his sister, though being the man of the family he naturally tried to shield her from his more negative feelings. On his return from the city she had been quick to notice that something had upset him, and he had told her it was just seeing their relations, and the family memories they brought back. That had been true, but it was not the whole truth. During his days in the city he had seen their struggle in a different light, and it had disturbed him.

This column of compas, striding through the night forest, seemed so full of strength and rightness, so powerful…but there were only forty-four of them, and only the trees and the darkness shielded them, and not 150 kilometres away two million people were getting on with their daily lives oblivious to the guerrillas’ very existence. In the city it was hard to believe that the Government could ever be toppled, that anything could shift the dead-weight of all that had gone before. It all seemed so permanent, so solid. Five hundred years’ worth. And when Tomás thought about how much his people had suffered to keep their world alive, he found it hard to imagine the world of the Ladinos and the Yankees proving any less stubborn.

Still, no matter how much he might doubt their eventual triumph, he never doubted the need to continue with their struggle. What, after all, was the alternative? To accept the way things were? The poem in Tomás’s pocket had the words for that: ‘…it seems to me that it cannot be, that in this way, we are going nowhere. To survive so has no glory.’

It had been the Old Man who had introduced him to the poetry of Pablo Neruda, a few months after their first meeting in the Mexican refugee camp. By then they had become firm friends – or perhaps more like father and son – but at the beginning Tomás had found it hard to take the older man seriously. His stories had seemed so outlandish, so much like comic-book adventures, that Tomás had taken him for the camp storyteller, more of an entertainer than a fighter.

In one story the Old Man had been taking some explosives to the guerrillas in the mountains, when he was stopped at an army roadblock. The soldiers were in a good mood that day, and only gave him a few bruises and burns before telling him he could continue on his way for no more than the price of his sack of beans. Unfortunately this was where he had hidden the explosives, so for an hour or more the Old Man pleaded and whined for the sack’s return. Eventually the lieutenant in charge of the roadblock grew so sick of this incessant lament that he hurled the bag at the Old Man and told him to get lost. His one great achievement in life, the storyteller told his listeners, was not to recoil at the prospect of an explosion as the sack landed at his feet.

And then there was his favourite escape story. He had been staying with comrades in Guatemala City, and alone in the house when the sound of vehicles approaching at high speed had alerted him. He had walked out into the front yard, picked up a broom and started sweeping, just as the lorries came hurtling down the street. They had screeched to a halt and disgorged running soldiers, all of whom raced straight past the Old Man into the house and started breaking furniture. The lieutenant in charge, who had been sent to arrest a notorious guerrilla leader, told him: ‘Get the fuck out of here, old man!’ He had accordingly shuffled off down the street.

Both these stories, Tomás had later found out, were true in every detail. The man he had taken for the camp storyteller was probably the most successful guerrilla leader in the history of Guatemala’s forty-year civil war. And if anyone could ‘get them on the run for a few weeks’, then it was him.

3

Barney Davies dropped Jean off at the hospital where she worked, and reached his office before eight, feeling torn between post-coital bliss and pre-mission anxiety. The smile which bubbled up from the one kept fading into the frown caused by the other.

The briefings on the current situation in Guatemala, which had already been faxed from Whitehall, didn’t do much for the smile. There was a lot of talk about that country’s return to civilian democracy, a few pious generalities about increased respect for human rights, and a lot of waffle about the importance of maintaining stability throughout Central America. According to the Foreign Office mandarins, the existence of a Mayan Indian rebellion in the Mexican state of Chiapas made it all the more imperative that the alleged progress towards an acceptable peace in Guatemala be sustained.

Reading between the lines, Davies was not convinced. After finishing the report he stared morosely out of the window for several minutes, and then ordered a second cup of tea and his first rock cake of the day.

One way of reducing the risks involved in sending Razor into the lion’s den, he had decided, was to send him in with company. The two men had got to know each other during the Bosnian business, and the mere fact that Razor had known that Chris Martinson was in Guatemala suggested at least a minimal level of continuing contact.

What the Guatemalans would think of it, Davies had no idea. Nor did he much care.

The tea arrived, together with a surprisingly friable rock cake.

The seventy-mile drive from Birmingham, most of it on motorways, took Razor about as many minutes. Driving was something he had always done well, and usually faster than this. But as Hajrija had tactfully pointed out, if all the other drivers had his judgement and reflexes then he could get away with driving like a lunatic. Until then…

He was getting older in more ways than one, Razor thought. Ten, fifteen years earlier, and the prospect of a mission like this would have had his body churning out adrenalin by the pint. His heart would have been leaping at the thought of getting away from Hereford and into action, away from routine and into the unknown. One voice in his brain was still singing this song, but only one, and it sounded more like an echo of his youth than a part of the man he now was. Other voices were dolefully reminding him that these overseas outings only ever looked good in prospect and retrospect, and were rarely anything other than terrifying at the time. This particular mission, so far as he could tell, looked about as inviting as a fortnight in Mogadishu. And on top of everything else he would be away from Hajrija for longer than he cared to think about.

By the time he reached Stirling Lines Razor was having trouble keeping in contact with the adventurer within.

Barney Davies greeted him with a wide smile and ordered cups of tea on the intercom. Razor glanced at the photograph frame on the CO’s desk, half expecting to find a new face inside it, but it still contained the familiar picture of his children. In the dim distant past another photograph had featured a wife.

‘What exactly do they want me to do?’ Razor asked, once the tea’s arrival had signalled the start of business.

‘As far as I know, simply identify the man who calls himself “El Espíritu”, or “The Ghost”.’ Presumably he’ll be in custody by then, though how they intend to catch him without knowing what he looks like seems a moot point.’

‘And then?’ Razor asked.

‘You come home.’

Razor grunted. ‘So we have no guarantee that…’ He paused. ‘Well, that they don’t just take him out and have him shot on my say-so.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought they’d want that sort of publicity,’ Davies said carefully.

Razor looked up, feeling the weight of doubt suddenly bearing down on him. ‘Which might just mean that they’ll wait until I’m on the plane home.’

Davies shrugged. ‘Maybe. The US State Department told the Foreign Office that if the Guatemalan Army had a hundred suspects they would probably shoot the lot, just to make sure of getting the right man.’

‘Bastards,’ Razor murmured, leaving Davies unsure whether he meant the State Department, Foreign Office or Guatemalan Army. Probably all three, he decided.

‘Look,’ the CO said, deciding to lay some cards on the table. ‘I don’t like this any more than you do. The Guatemalans are leaning on the Yanks, and they’re leaning on us, and it’s you who’ll pick up the tab…’

‘Come back, Docherty, all is forgiven,’ Razor muttered.

Davies uttered a silent prayer of thanks that Jamie Docherty was now living in Chile, and far removed from this mess. ‘It seems to me,’ he said, ‘that there’s two ways we can go with this. Either you can refuse outright to go…’ He looked Razor straight in the eye. ‘And if you do I’ll back you all the way.’

‘Thanks, boss, but…’

‘Or you can go out there and play it by ear. When it comes to the crunch you’ll have to decide for yourself whether you want to identify this man or not. By then you should have a much better idea of who and what you’re dealing with. On both sides of the fence.’

‘You mean, when the moment comes I just look through the guy with an innocent expression on my face,’ Razor said, amused. ‘I like it.’

‘Not necessarily. We know the man kidnapped a whole tour party, and God knows what else he’s got up to in the last fifteen years. He’s no innocent, whatever else he is.’

‘He must be pretty old by now,’ Razor said. ‘He looked like a pensioner in 1980.’

‘Anyway,’ Davies went on, ‘I’m not sending you out there alone.’

‘I was going…’

‘Chris Martinson can keep you company.’

‘Oh, great. But I was thinking about someone else. The wife has always wanted to see Guatemala for some reason, and…’

‘I don’t think…’

‘Only as a tourist, of course. She can do her own thing while I bond with the Guatemalan Army. She could maybe open the odd fête, if the Guatemalans ask her.’

Davies grinned in spite of himself. ‘I don’t know…’

‘Maybe it’s only an old Yugoslav custom, but she thinks men on diplomatic missions often take their wives along, with all expenses paid by the grateful hosts.’

The CO laughed. ‘I can’t wait to hear what the Foreign Office will say,’ he said, reaching for the phone.

It took five minutes for the secretary to locate Martin Clarke, but far less time for Davies to lose his temper. ‘If you are not prepared to ask the Guatemalans to accept a two-man team then you can go and look for help somewhere else,’ he told Clarke. ‘I am not prepared to send a single soldier, no matter how experienced, into a potential combat situation without any reliable backup.’

‘I am not interested in debating the issue,’ Clarke said.

‘Then just get on with arranging what I asked for,’ Davies said, and slammed down the phone.

Razor raised his eyebrows.

‘He’ll call back in a few minutes,’ Davies said, with a confidence which he only half felt. It was kind of exhilarating, though, telling one of Her Majesty’s Ministers where to get off.

And it worked. Clarke was back on the line in less than five minutes, sounding chagrined but humble. The Guatemalans didn’t quite understand the necessity, he said, but they were happy to provide hospitality for as many Britons as came.

‘Good,’ Davies said. ‘Please inform them that Sergeant Wilkinson will also be bringing his wife, who is eager to visit their beautiful country. They will need accommodation, and so will Sergeant Martinson. He is already in Guatemala, in Antigua.’ He read out the address. ‘If the relevant authorities can liaise with Martinson, he can meet the Wilkinsons at the airport on Sunday. Oh, and we’ll need a ticket for Mrs Wilkinson on the same flight as her husband.’

‘Anything else?’ Clarke asked coldly.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ Davies said, and put the phone down. He looked across at Razor, who was grinning at him, and looking not much more than half his thirty-six years. Davies smiled back, determined not to offer any outward display of the sudden sense of foreboding in his heart.

The news that the British had agreed to send their soldier reached Guatemala City soon after dawn, and an eager Alvaro was waiting to inform Serrano of the good tidings when the latter arrived at the G-2 offices in the Palacio Nacional.

‘Good,’ Serrano said, stirring sugar into the coffee which had just been brought to his desk.

‘He will join up with the man in Antigua, the one we knew about,’ Alvaro added. ‘And he is bringing his wife.’

Serrano was pleased. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘That must mean that no pressure has been put on him. If he is bringing his wife he must be happy to come. He will be a good witness.’

‘I thought of putting them in the Pan-American Hotel,’ Alvaro said. ‘Tourists seem to like it.’

‘They like it because it is comfortable, but not so luxurious that the streets outside make them feel guilty,’ Serrano said. ‘A good choice,’ he added.

‘Thank you, sir.’

Serrano sipped appreciatively at the dark coffee. ‘Has there been any progress in the business of finding El Espíritu?’ he asked, knowing full well that if there had been he would have been the first to know.

‘Nothing definite yet, but the net is being drawn in.’

Serrano allowed himself a thin smile. ‘Let’s hope the little shit is in it.’

The sun was sinking behind the twin peaks of Fuego and Acatenango as Chris approached his lodgings. Like most of the houses in Antigua, the Martinez family residence wasn’t much to look at from the outside, offering just a bare wall painted pastel yellow, with two small windows protected by wrought-iron grilles. But once through the gate the visitor found himself in an exquisite courtyard, decorated with palms and flowering pink bougainvillaea, and surrounded by cool, shuttered rooms.

From one of these rooms Chris could hear two voices which had become increasingly familiar over the past two and a half weeks; they belonged to Clara and Romero, the leading characters in the family’s favourite soap opera. Costa del Oro was supposedly made in Colombia, though Chris had never noticed anything which reminded him of his own trip to that country. The programme was basically an Hispanic Baywatch, with even flimsier swimsuits, acting and story-lines. The Martinez family adored it.

He was waved into the only empty seat, next to sixteen-year-old Maria, whose life seemed to revolve around flirting with whoever was at hand, and whom Chris found worryingly attractive. This evening, though, she was too engrossed in the TV show to nestle up to him.

Chris watched it too, feeling pleased that he understood more or less everything that was being said, right down to the occasional – and probably unintentional – ironic nuances. His time in Antigua had certainly delivered the goods as far as his Spanish was concerned, and he had even grown rather fond of his hosts. In many ways they reminded him of an English family – only the names of the soap operas had been changed.

The day’s episode ended with a cliff-hanger which made Chris nostalgic for the subtlety of Neighbours, and left the Martínezes in temporary shock. Senora Martinez recovered first, and headed for the kitchen, announcing over her shoulder that dinner would be in half an hour.

‘There has been a call for you,’ Maria told Chris, fixing her deep-black eyes on him.

‘From who?’ Chris asked.

‘Your embassy in Guatemala City,’ Senor Martinez told him. ‘They want you to call them back. Please, use our telephone.’

Chris did so, and was put through to the Military Attaché, Ben Manley, with whom he had once served in the Green Howards. Manley relayed the new orders from Hereford, half sarcastically adding that it sounded ‘like fun’.

‘Doesn’t it just,’ Chris agreed wryly.

For the next couple of hours he put the whole business to the back of his mind, and concentrated on enjoying his dinner. After he had helped with the dishes – something which still astonished the whole family – he announced he was going for a walk, and then dealt Maria a crushing blow by refusing to ask for her company. He needed to do some thinking, he told her. She gave him a persecuted look.

Once outside, Chris began wandering aimlessly through Antigua’s network of streets, feeling dismayed by the news. He told himself it would be good to see Razor and Hajrija, and that there seemed every likelihood he would now get to see parts of the country which were well off the tourist track. Who knew? – he might even find the twitcher’s holy grail, a quetzal in the wild.

It wasn’t enough. He felt almost cheated, and realized that although he still had two months of his final term to serve, he had begun to think and feel as if the SAS was already behind him.

He had been a good soldier – he was certain of that – but being a soldier, and an SAS soldier at that, had always been a means to an end for him, not an end in itself. It had given him the scope to stretch himself, and to see the wild parts of the world in a way which the tourist or even the seasoned traveller never could. There was no adventure-holiday company yet which offered a week-long hike out of Colombia, across mountains and through jungle, with the forces of a drug cartel and the national army on your tail.

But after Bosnia things hadn’t been the same. Maybe it had been the mission itself, or maybe he had just outgrown one way of looking at himself and the world. Damien Robson had died there, making Joss Wynwood and himself the only remaining survivors of the Colombian mission. That was chilling enough, but not the main reason for his change of heart. In Bosnia he and Razor – both of whom had chosen medicine as their first SAS specialization – had spent as much time looking after people as they had fighting. There had been the women from the Serb brothel, the children injured in the shelling of Zavik. He and Docherty had been round Sarajevo’s City Hospital, and witnessed the incredible dedication of people working in near-impossible conditions.

Back in England he had decided that there were other ways to travel and to serve than with the SAS. He had been quite happy to serve out the remainder of his three-year term. The work was rarely boring and there were always new opportunities to learn. Some of these – like the helicopter pilot’s course he had recently begun – would provide him with skills that were bound to be useful in the sort of Third World situations where he expected to find his civilian future.

What he had not anticipated was that anyone would ask him to take up arms again, much less send him out on loan to an army notorious for its murderous cruelty.

The MI5 report was waiting on Martin Clarke’s desk when he arrived back that evening from a day-trip to Brussels. Placing the miniature hamper of Belgian chocolates to one side – he had forgotten Valentine’s Day the previous year, and decided to shop in advance this time – he took the file across to the armchair by the window and started to read.

Darren James Wilkinson was born on 6 February 1958, which made him almost thirty-seven. And, as Clarke’s wife Sarah would have told him, an Aquarius. He had been raised in Islington and Walthamstow by his hospital nurse mother, and attended the local comprehensives. The name Highbury Grove rang a bell. Wasn’t that the school Rhodes Boyson had been headmaster of? God help the pupils, Clarke thought.

Wilkinson had clearly shown no aptitude for study. He had left school in the summer of 1974, and spent the next eighteen months moving from job to job. He had been out of the country several times during that period, mostly as a travelling football supporter, but there had also been two three-month stints as a barman in Marbella. He had joined the Army soon after his eighteenth birthday. After four years’ service with the Welsh Guards he had applied to join the SAS, and satisfied all the entrance requirements with flying colours.

No doubt his experiences as a football hooligan had come in handy, Clarke thought sourly.

But he had to admit that the man had an excellent service record. His first important job had been the one in Guatemala, and though he had obviously played a subordinate role, he had been commended for his performance. Two years later there had been the business in Argentina, which Clarke already knew about. The only new information in this regard concerned Wilkinson’s subsequent arrest, along with fellow-trooper Stewart Nevis, on a charge of being drunk and disorderly in the Chilean town of Puerto Natales. The two men had apparently defaced a local statue and given the locals an impromptu concert at two in the morning.

‘Once a football hooligan, always a football hooligan,’ Clarke murmured to himself.

Still, Wilkinson had been promoted to corporal almost immediately, and raised to the rank of sergeant five years later, when he joined the staff of the Regiment’s Training Wing. From then until the Bosnia mission early in 1993 he had hardly been out of the UK.

Clarke had never been privy to the details of the affair in Bosnia, and after reading the report’s account he could see why his superiors had not been eager to publicize the matter. The SAS team had been sent in to investigate rumours that one of their own colleagues was running a private war in the Bosnian mountains, and if necessary to extract him by force. Instead of doing so, they had rescued about fifty women from a Serb prison, done everything but assist their renegade colleague in his private war, and then ignored direct orders to bring the man out, escorting a truckload of wounded children to safety instead.

The report attributed this wilful insubordination to the team commander, the now-retired Sergeant James Docherty, but as far as Clarke could see no action had been taken against either him or any of the others. The SAS had simply closed ranks around the matter, as if the Regiment was a law unto itself. Which it probably was, Clarke thought. He was still smarting from the way its Commanding Officer had addressed him a few days earlier.

What had Wilkinson’s contribution to the affair been? Clarke wondered. Had he argued with Docherty, simply followed orders, or even encouraged him? There was no way of knowing. But it was Wilkinson who had married the Bosnian woman that the SAS team brought out with them; Wilkinson who had called the MoD official at RAF Brize Norton ‘a prick’.

Clarke sighed and stared out at the London night. There didn’t seem much doubt that the man was prone to insubordination. But at least he hadn’t been in any trouble since the Bosnian business. According to the report he had suffered from persistent nightmares for a while, but a few visits to the Regiment’s ‘psychiatric counsellor’ had apparently put him back together again. Anyway, he was the one the Guatemalans wanted. They could damn well keep him in order.

Ten minutes later Clarke began telling his contact in the US State Department that there were few finer examples of British soldiering at its brilliant best than Sergeant Darren Wilkinson of 22 SAS.

A solitary bird suddenly began to sing, and after what seemed only a momentary pause, another thousand joined in. Emelia Xicay lay flat on her stomach in the tall grass above the road and listened. For a few minutes the nerves which always preceded an action were banished, and she smiled with unalloyed pleasure. At times like this she always felt truly blessed – this, just as much as the horrors and the sadnesses, was her birthright as a Mayan Indian. Here in the mist she felt herself enveloped by the damp richness of the earth and trees, carried along by the song of the birds. She belonged in the natural world, the way so few foreigners seemed to do.

At such times she felt almost sorry for the Ladinos, who seemed to have no such sense. But not all of them, she reminded herself sternly. Tomás said some understood life and the earth the same way their own people did. He had Ladino friends, and she would too, once she could speak to them fluently in their own language.

She thought about the city, and wondered if she would ever see it. Tomás had told her about it, of course, and so had Francisco, but she suspected that both brother and lover had censored their accounts, as if they was trying to protect her from all the many evils which befell their people there.

She hadn’t thought about Francisco for several days, she realized. It was almost a year now since his death in the army ambush.

She turned her mind back to the city. She didn’t want to live there, just to see it. The biggest towns she had ever visited were Santa Cruz del Quiche in Guatemala and San Cristobal de las Casas in Mexico. They had lived just outside the latter for a while, and Emelia had sold woven bracelets to the tourists in the town’s main square with several other refugee children. She could remember lifting up her wares to the smoked-glass windows of the big buses, the pale white hands reaching down with money.

The men on the road below were speaking to each other in low voices, and Emelia thought she caught Tomás’s Tzutujil accent among them. The first hint of light was showing in the mist away to her left, above the deep and hidden valley which carried the road up from Cunen.

He should be leaving about now, if he was leaving at all. According to the reports of the compas assigned to the task of watching over him, Morales was a creature of rigid habits, and so far there had been no sign that the fate of Major Muñoz had persuaded him to deviate from any of his normal routines. Each Friday morning he left the command HQ in Cunen and drove across these mountains to the subordinate outpost at El Desengaño, where he gathered intelligence of the previous week’s operations and planned those for the following week. There seemed no practical reason for this journey by road – radio communication would have served just as well, or a helicopter could have covered the same distance in a tenth of the time – but Morales liked to impose himself in person, and from all accounts he loved to drive, and to be seen driving, his new Cherokee Chief station wagon.

And in any case, the Old Man had said, what did Morales have to worry about? His friends in the neighbouring command would have told him the guerrillas were cowering in the forest, somewhere inside the closing ring of troops thirty kilometres to the west. True, they hadn’t actually been seen for several days, but there was no way they could have broken out.

Emelia hoped the Old Man was right. He usually was.

It was getting steadily lighter now, and holes were beginning to appear in the mist, drifting holes, like floating windows. On the road below she could now see the seven compañeros in their costumes, and the glass cabinet lying on its side. At the foot of the grassy bank Jorge was setting light to the second of two censers packed with incense. Smoke from the first was already wafting up to reinforce the mist, and carrying the sweet, acrid smell to Emelia’s nostrils.

With both censers burning, the group below settled into stillness, like a film frozen on a single frame, waiting to be restarted. Emelia lay there with the rifle, watching the mist slowly clear, hearing the chorus of birdsong gradually abate, feeling the cold edge drawn from the air by the rising sun. Ten minutes went by, and twenty, and thirty, and then she could hear the sound of vehicles. As it grew steadily louder the tableau on the road below sprang back into life. She swallowed nervously, and tried not to grip the rifle too tightly.

As he guided the Cherokee Chief up the steep incline, Captain Juan Garcia Morales was thinking about what to do with his new-found wealth. He had just inherited around 200,000 quetzals from a great-uncle, and those closest to him could not agree as to how he should invest it. His wife wanted him to buy property in Florida, but his father was advising Lake Atitlán. Morales instinctively preferred the Florida option, but he had to admit that his father was rarely wrong when it came to such matters. ‘You get yourself a shoreline on the most beautiful lake in the world,’ he had told his son, ‘and in five years the value will multiply tenfold or more. Once we have the Indian business finally settled you won’t be able to see that lake for investors.’

He was probably right. After all, Lake Atitlán had continued to draw tourists no matter how bad things got. And if they could move the Indians back from the shoreline, and simply bus them in to work in the hotels and sell the stuff the tourists loved so much, then the sky was probably the limit. The place could become another Acapulco.

Morales steered the car round a bend in the slope, and drove through a small but stubborn patch of mist, emerging just above a sheer drop of several hundred metres. He could feel the nervousness of the soldiers beside and behind him, and rather enjoyed the sensation. In the rear-view mirror he was watching for the following jeep to materialize out of the mist when figures loomed out of another patch almost directly in front of him.

As he applied the brakes Morales instinctively reached for his holstered automatic, and then brought his hand away empty. It was only a bunch of Indian holy men – cofradías, they were called; he was always running into them on the roads, carrying their holy dummies to one of their countless festivals. And this bunch of idiots had managed to drop their dummy – he could see it, a child’s version of the Virgin Mary, lying face down on the road, next to the overturned cabinet in which they had been carrying it.

One of the old men was walking towards the Cherokee, probably to apologize for getting in the Army’s way. Morales took note of the ridiculous costume – the knee-length shorts and the rag wound round the man’s head – and wondered why the tourists found this anything other than pathetic.

The weather-beaten face of the old man was smiling apologetically at him as he approached the car window. And then, as if by magic, a revolver was boring into Morales’s ear.

‘If you want to live another second,’ the old man said in perfect Spanish, ‘tell your men to leave the jeep without their weapons.’

Razor closed the guidebook and tried stuffing it into the pocket on the back of the seat in front of him. This was not easy, as the slim pocket already contained his Walkman, two airline magazines, instructions on how to behave if the airliner suddenly plummeted 30,000 feet into the Atlantic, a Ruth Rendell mystery and a half-empty quarter-bottle of Sauvignon Blanc.

He had learnt one thing from Hajrija’s guidebook – the rest of Guatemala had little in common with the bit he had visited in 1980. The ruins of Tikal were situated in the thinly populated northern half of the country, a mostly flat area of jungles and swamps, but most of the country’s people lived either on the Pacific coastal plain or in the vast swath of mountains, plateaux and valleys which formed the country’s backbone. It sounded like Chris Martinson’s descriptions of Colombia, and like nothing Razor had ever seen.

In the window seat next to him Hajrija was happily giggling at Blackadder, which was showing on the tiny screen. Razor reckoned he’d already seen the episode about half a dozen times, and watching the final scenes without the benefit of headphones, he found he could lip-read the dialogue.

He sneaked a glance at Hajrija’s happy face, and wondered yet again at his luck in not only finding but also holding on to her. Her lustrous black hair was pulled loosely back in a ponytail, making her look younger than usual, and her high cheekbones were faintly glistening in the sunlight. The first time he had seen her, standing in the corridor of the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, those cheekbones had jutted from a face made gaunt by stress and an inadequate diet.

The credits started to roll, and she took off the headphones. ‘The English are completely crazy,’ she said, readjusting her hair.

‘It’s all we have left,’ Razor said. He retrieved the guidebook from the crowded pocket. ‘What first made you want to go to Guatemala?’ he asked.

She lifted both shoulders in the familiar shrug. ‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘You know how it is – some countries just seem appealing. Some don’t. Maybe I saw some pictures when I was a child, or a programme on TV. I can’t remember. But I always wanted to see Lake Atitlán. I mean, how many big lakes are there with volcanoes all around them? And I grew up in mountains. The air is so clear in places like that, and the colours. I love it. I want to see Peru as well, and Kashmir.’

She was switching channels as she spoke, in search of further entertainment. ‘Are you going to watch a movie?’ she asked.

‘Don’t think so.’

‘Are you OK?’ she asked, turning towards him, feeling slightly worried. He didn’t seem his usual ebullient self.

‘Fine. I just don’t like watching things on a screen the size of a postage stamp.’

‘You should have your eyes tested,’ she said.

He nodded and grinned.

Satisfied, she put the headphones back on and left him to the guidebook. Razor squeezed it back into the pocket and sat back with his eyes closed, thinking how strange it was to be heading out on a job like this with her beside him. Still, this whole trip had a strange feeling to it. For one thing the CO had driven them to Gatwick in person, which had to be a first. And for most of the journey Razor had had the feeling Davies was biting his tongue rather than saying what was on his mind. His last words had been: ‘Remember, if you feel the need to press the ejector button, just do it. And we’ll just have to deal with the political fall-out.’

That was all very well, Razor thought, but he preferred Jamie Docherty’s epigram: ‘When the shit hits the fan, it’s too late to turn the fan off.’

What the hell. He looked at his watch, and saw that the Tottenham versus Blackburn game was an hour away from kick-off. Just his luck, he thought – the day they played the League leaders and he had to miss it. If there was ever a nuclear war, Razor was convinced it would come with Tottenham one point short of their first League title since the Middle Ages.

He closed his eyes again, and let the hum of the jet engines lull him into sleep.

Chris Martinson and Ben Manley sat in the coffee bar which overlooked the arrival hall at Guatemala City’s Aurora International Airport, and watched a plane-load of American tourists and returning Ladino families pluck their luggage from the carousel.

‘Is this guy a friend or just a brother-in-arms?’ Manley asked.

‘A friend, I suppose,’ Chris said. He had always been something of a loner, and since Eddie Wilshaw’s death in Colombia he had got used to the idea of not having friends, but over the past couple of years he had felt closer to Razor than anyone else, male or female.

‘Well, that should help,’ Manley said. ‘But these Guatemalan Army guys, they’re not half as bad as the press they get. Most of the officers come from good families, and most of them have been trained in the States. There are a few psychos, like there are in any army, ours included.’

‘What about G-2?’ Chris asked.

‘They had a bad reputation in the eighties, and I suppose it’s still not good. But you won’t have to deal with them. We’ve been promised this is a strictly Army affair.’

Chris sipped at his coffee, wondering who Manley was trying to kid. There didn’t seem much left of the wide-eyed innocent Chris had first known in the Green Howards. Manley was a fellow East Anglian and another bird-watcher, and they had spent a lot of time together in those days, both in England and Germany. But their career paths had diverged, and Manley seemed to have acquired the blinkers necessary for following his. He hadn’t changed, simply narrowed his focus.

Maybe he had himself, Chris thought, but he didn’t think so. ‘What’s the social life like around here?’ he asked.

‘Restricted. Just the other embassies, really. Most of the locals you meet are too rich to notice you. There’s only the junior officers, really, and some of them are OK. They know where the action is, anyway.’

‘And the women?’ Chris asked.

‘Difficult. This is a Catholic country, so any female over fourteen is either a wife, a Virgin Mary or a tart. The only real exceptions are students, and you have to be pretty careful what you’re getting into with them as well.’

‘What about the Indians?’

Manley snorted. ‘Another world altogether. It’s like apartheid,’ he added, without any apparent moral judgement. ‘The two worlds just don’t mix.’

Except when it comes to hiring servants, Chris thought to himself, just as a growing roar outside announced the arrival of another flight.

‘That’ll be the Miami flight,’ Manley said, getting to his feet. ‘We’d better get down there.’

Razor and Hajrija were still on the plane when a smiling young man in a uniform arrived to escort them through the entry formalities. These consisted of a single brief conversation between their young man and another uniform in a booth, who thereupon attacked both their passports with a fearsome-looking stamp. Their bags, which included two SAS uniforms and two Browning High Power 9mm semi-automatics with extra magazines, had already reached the arrival hall, where Chris Martinson and another man were standing guard over it.

‘Look what the wind blew in,’ Chris said.

‘It’s good to see you too,’ Razor said. ‘I was wondering who was going to carry the luggage.’

Manley thanked the Guatemalan and led the other three across the cavernous hall and out through the exit. On the other side of the road Hertz and Budget car rental offices sat beneath a huge hoarding advertising Lucky Strike cigarettes. ‘I love exotic countries,’ Razor said, as Manley opened up the embassy limousine.

The Wilkinsons slumped into the back seat. ‘The hotel’s good,’ Chris said from the front, just as a huge roar sounded to their left and two Chinook military helicopters loomed above the row of offices and lifted away out of sight. They reminded Razor of Apocalypse Now. Nice omen, he thought.

A few moments later they were passing under an old stone aqueduct and entering the city. At the first major intersection a large building announced itself as Chuck E Cheese’s Centre Mall, and behind it were ranged several residential high-rises. It all looked like the Lea Bridge Road translated into Spanish, Razor decided.

Things improved as Manley turned the car down a broad, tree-lined boulevard. There were donkey rides for children in the wide central reservation, and one local entrepreneur was doing a roaring trade in Batman T-shirts. Most of the buildings lining the road seemed to be either hotels or offices, and all of them flew the sky-blue and white national flag.

‘There’s a logic to their flag,’ Manley told them. ‘The blue on either side symbolizes the Pacific and Atlantic, and the white in between is the peace the conquistadors brought to the land. Hence the quetzal holding the olive branch.’

Irony, blindness, or plain conceit? Chris wondered. Probably a combination of the last two.

‘One of the more endearing things about this place,’ Manley was saying, ‘is the number of rich crazies it seems to produce. People with more money than sense. Look at this church on the left…’

They all stared out at the bizarre building, which seemed to have been constructed as a monument to several different architectural traditions. It looked like a cross between the Kremlin, Westminster Abbey and a Venetian palace.

‘There’s a copy of the Eiffel Tower a couple of streets over,’ Manley went on, ‘and in one of the parks there’s a relief map of the country the size of a tennis court. This is a strange town.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Razor said, as they drove past a huge statue of two fighting bulls. ‘What’s that?’ he asked, as they passed a large, castle-like building, complete with battlements and armed guards.

‘Police headquarters.’

‘Figures.’

They passed under a railway bridge and across a wide open space between parks before burrowing into a narrower street festooned with advertisements.

‘This is the oldest part of the city,’ Manley said.

It looked more interesting, but not a lot more welcoming. There didn’t seem to be many people on the streets, and most of those seemed to be hurrying along, heads bowed down, as if keen to reach home before something bad happened. There was something distinctly shabby about the capital of Guatemala, Razor thought. And perhaps sinister as well.

‘Most of the guidebooks tell tourists not to waste any time here,’ Hajrija said, as if sharing his thoughts.

The hotel, though, was as good as Chris claimed. A small corridor led into a covered courtyard, whose walls were lined with samples of the woven designs of different Mayan tribes. Razor and Hajrija sat down at one of the tables and looked at them while Manley and Chris checked them in.

Having done his job, the embassy man left, and a hotel employee showed them to their rooms. The doors were numbered, and on the wall beside each one there was a small painting of a Mayan god. ‘That’s Ixchel, the Goddess of Medicine,’ Hajrija said, looking at the one by their door.

Razor was impressed.

‘Some people sleep on planes, some read,’ she told him.

‘I’m going to have a stroll around the main square,’ Chris announced. ‘You two probably want to get some rest.’

‘Yeah…’ Razor began.

‘We’ll come,’ Hajrija said. ‘I need to stretch my legs after all that sitting.’

‘How far is it?’ Razor asked hopefully.

‘Just round the corner,’ Chris said.

Five minutes later they were crossing the road which surrounded the square, and entering an expanse the size of two football pitches. At the end away to their right a large, twin-towered, cream-coloured church seemed to glow against the darkening sky, while directly ahead of them a much larger building of similar vintage was already brooding in the twilight shadows. More noteworthy than either, the square itself was packed with people, some selling a variety of wares but most simply taking the early-evening air. The majority were in Western dress, but there was also a significant number of people wearing traditional Indian costume. After the half-empty streets of their drive from the airport this much life seemed almost intoxicating.

The three of them wandered through the throng in the general direction of the church, past women cooking corn-cobs on small charcoal braziers, men hawking bursts of candyfloss that were displayed like trophies on large wooden crosses, and more women sitting with little piles of herbs arranged on cotton sheets. Children sucked lollipops, chewed on tortillas and drank from the elegant glass Coca-Cola bottles which Razor remembered from his childhood. A tide of noise, of conversation and laughter and children crying, rolled over them. A series of overlapping smells rose and faded in their nostrils.

A rapid-fire succession of deafening explosions almost made them jump out of their skins, but there was only excitement on the faces all around, and the clouds of smoke billowing into the air above the western end of the square came from nothing more threatening than fireworks. The threesome grinned sheepishly at each other, and joined the crowd in its drift towards the scene of the action.

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